Innumerable varieties and combinations of interglandular action supply us with the limitless types of adolescent girls.  Some endocrine cooperatives that make one girl stable and settled, will make others unstable and unsettled.  Alicia may be hyperthyroid, and so excitable, nervous, restless, and subject to palpitation of heart and sleeplessness.  Bettina may have too much post-pituitary, and so will menstruate early, tend to be short, blush easily, be sentimentally suggestive and sexually accessible.  Christina may be adrenal cortex centred and so masculinoid:  courageous, sporty, mannish in her tastes, aggressive toward her companions.  Dorothea may have a balanced thyroid and pituitary and so lead the class as good-looking, studious, bright, serene and mature.  Florence, who has rather more thyroid than her pituitary can balance, will be bright but flighty, gay but moody, energetic, but not as persevering.  And so on and so on.

Environment, habit-formation, training, education serve only to bring out the internal secretion make-up of the girl, or to suppress and distort and so spoil her.  Adolescence will be peaceful, calm, semi-conscious, or disturbing, revolutionary and obsessive according to the reaction of the other endocrines to the rise of the ovaries.  Harmony, and so continued happiness of the mind and body, means that they have been welcomed into the fold.  Disharmony, ailments, unhappiness, difficulties, mean that they are being treated as intruders, or are acting as marauders.  The after life, sexually the period of maturity, barring accidents, diseases, and shocks, will bear the same character.  The kind of adolescence provides the clue to the kind of maturity, for both are effects of the same endocrine factors.

THE SEX GLAND CHAIN

Furthermore, the activities of a normal woman involve a series of sex glands.  Since there function, in addition to the ovaries, the glands of the uterus, the breasts or mammary glands, and the placental gland (the secreting cells of the tissue which comes out as the after-birth).  Each of these contributes directly to the reproductive life of the individual.  To call the ova the sex glands is to confer upon them a name which really belongs to a chain of glands.

All of the members of the sex chain, including those of the thyroid, the adrenal and the pituitary, are necessary to the functions of menstruation, impregnation, settlement of fertilized ovum in the wall of the uterus, labor and lactation.  A disturbance of one of them will set up disturbances all along the line, and a resonance of distress or compensation upon the part of all of them.  As an interlocking directorate over the sexual functions of the female, they are members one of the other.  So what helps or hurts one, helps or hurts all.

THE CYCLE OF MENSTRUATION